Professor Richard Sakwa: The political West finds itself increasingly isolated and aggressive

The initiative for the letter came from Lord Robert Skidelsky, who is Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at the University of Warwick. And he then invited a few of us to sign it. And I immediately agreed to do so, in spite of the fact that there are many questions about how this ceasefire can be negotiated, how long it should last, and of course the fact that both sides – the Russians and the Ukrainians – are saying that the other side would use the ceasefire to improve its military position. I've been arguing right from the start, however, that all wars sooner or later end in some sort of negotiations. And what we're talking about at this stage are merely talks about talks – at least to start the process. So that's the spirit of it, and I certainly fully endorse the sentiments in the letter which call for that.

And how realistic do you think it is that there might be some movement towards a willingness for negotiations and a ceasefire? Or is this still unrealistic?

It's completely unrealistic. The trend is the other way. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't call for it – that's a separate question. Because the right thing to do is to have a ceasefire and to start talks about talks. However, between the right thing and the actual thing there's a growing gulf. At the moment, the 75th anniversary meeting of NATO in Washington is just coming to a close. And the declaration adopted at that meeting, on the 10th of July, is unremittingly hostile to Russia. I mean, even more so than it is towards Iran and China. It has basically declared Russia an enemy – resolute, for the long term. NATO is digging in. And if you look at the language, it has made it existential – paragraph after paragraph. And reading it, it's almost as if they're overcompensating for their perhaps lack of self-confidence, because this isn't the language of a self-confident organization. But of course, the fate of NATO is in the balance.

And what do you think the situation looks like from the Russian side?

Russia is also digging in. It's true we had the speech by Putin on the 12th of June, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which outlined a peace deal. But of course, that was with the condition that the four new oblasts and Crimea be part of Russia, and so on. So both sides are digging in.

A lot of people who in the past were very confident in a Ukrainian victory, are now saying it's inevitable that Ukraine will have to give up some territory, and that they should seek a negotiated settlement before the situation gets even worse. Do you agree? And if so, how much longer do you think this will have to go on before we see some real movement towards negotiations?

Well at the moment, as I said, NATO is digging in. They're looking forward now to the latest wonder weapon, the F-16, and then more, and more. It's true that Macron, with his vision of French troops on the ground, suffered a relative defeat in the recent French parliamentary elections, and European parliament elections. But at the moment, the West – or what I call the political West – is minded to escalate and escalate and escalate – the argument being that Russia's red lines are simply a bluff. But as the Russians say: It's a bluff, until it isn't a bluff. The battlefield situation in the long term would, of course, inevitably tilt against Ukraine if it was on its own – given Russia's 'escalation dominance', as Barack Obama put it back in 2015. Far more manpower, a huge industrial complex, out-producing in terms of shells, etc. However, the West is gearing up – the European Union, shell production factories being built and retooled in the United States. And so, with massive Western support, the war could go on and on and on. We're talking about a 10-year war. Obviously, the longer it goes on, Ukraine will be devastated. It'll have very few men left. But we knew that right from the start when the West refused to accept the Istanbul agreement, back in March, April 2022 – 'to the last Ukrainian'. And of course, this is already happening.

You say the West refused to accept the Istanbul agreement, but of course the final decision to reject it was Ukraine's, at least officially. How decisive is the influence the West exercises in Ukraine?

You know, Ukrainians constantly talk about their agency. But of course, their agency was lost when NATO in March/April of 2022 said they will not guarantee and will not engage in negotiations. And of course, that's been the position ever since. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have died in the meantime, and the political outcome for Ukraine will be a negative one. But as I say, there are three wars going on at the same time: the one in Ukraine and about Ukraine, the one in Europe about the European security order, and the one over the global order – that this war is needed to deter China and so on. Which, in my view, is an abstraction and a dangerous one. It's a version of the old Vietnam style domino theory, that one communist takeover will lead to another. Of course the vision that Russia will go from Ukraine and start invading the Baltic Republics, Poland, and so on, is a fantasy. But the West has worked itself up into such a state of denial of reality – just as it did over Vietnam – that it's going to be very hard to walk down. In the meantime, if you look at the NATO declaration, the global vision is that Ukraine is simply like the Somme in 1916 – left devastated, with massive losses, but this is necessary at the global level.

Do you have any clear sense of where that larger, global struggle might be heading?

I think definitely we're witnessing the emergence of intensified bloc politics, essentially a new Cold War. On the one side, we have the Political West – NATO and the European Union – forging an ever closer alliance. And this isn't just a military and socioeconomic, it's also an ideological front, worse than even in the first Cold War. There is, of course, dissent – which is not so much suppressed, but certainly suffocated to a large degree. For example, we've got a new Labour government in the United Kingdom. And of course, the earlier dissenting voices within the Labour Party, epitomised by Jeremy Corbyn, have been expelled. And any critical voices from the left critiquing the war have been marginalised, if not completely expunged. And this is a process going on throughout the political West. Viktor Orban's visit to Moscow, to Ukraine before that, and to China, has been deeply denounced by the European Union – which is very odd because the European Union used to be a peace project, and it seems now to have become a war project. So in short, we have the consolidation of a political West, which has been going on anyway since the end of the first Cold War.

On the other side, we're seeing the emergence of a 'political East', as I call it – it's just a convenient term, the counterpart to the political West. Most people would call it something like an 'autocratic bloc of Eurasian states', with some sort of denigratory adjective attached to it. But this political East, an alignment of countries with obviously Russia and China at its core, was denounced over and over again at this NATO summit and in its declaration, with endless warnings to China that it should stop supporting Russia. Now, this is quite extraordinary, because who does the West think it is, to be able to tell China, a country with 5,000 years of civilization behind it, how to behave and what it perceives as its own national interests? And of course, there's a debate within China about Russia and the West, which is quite important and we shouldn't forget it. But nevertheless, the more the political West blusters and threatens China, I think the closer the alignment of Russia and China will be. One final point, of course, is that the political situation in the United States is heading for some sort of very contested election in November, so quite clearly the political context of the war may change.

Is the political East becoming a bloc in the sense of a strong alliance, in the way that the political West is a bloc?

No, the political East is not simply the analogue of the political West. Its dynamic is very different. I mean, all the states in the political East refuse that sort of bloc politics of the political West. It's anti-hegemonic, it's anti-bloc. It's basically defending the idea of Sovereign Internationalism, a vision of global order based on the equality of all sovereign states, as outlined in the UN Charter. Whereas the political West has as its vision that the whole world has to become democratic – the Democratic Internationalism at its heart. In short, we have the nascent political East, which repudiates the pretensions and the primacy advanced by the political West.

We also, of course, have a very large – not a bloc, but a very large confluence, if you like, of states in the Global South, which could be defined as swing states, but who are not aligning with one or the other bloc. But it's important to say that there is a lot of sympathy in the Global South for the political East. Because they understand that the political West isn't just a military-political alliance or an ideological alliance. It is also a vast system of political economy. And it's widely felt that Western neoliberalism, the Chicago School of Economics and so forth, has devastated economies across Latin America and Africa and Asia. So the political West is facing challenges from all fronts – but above all, from its own recklessness, its own squandering of that peace prospect which was possible at the end of the first Cold War. It's alienating more and more of the world. And as it's finding itself more and more isolated, it's becoming more and more aggressive. And so this NATO summit with its declaration was so extreme, that one feels: Hang on, what's wrong with these people?

Let's talk for a moment about the history of how these two blocs came to be what they are, and the two conceptions of international order that they represent. You've just mentioned two different 'visions' of international order – or 'models', as you call them in the book: Sovereign Internationalism, based on the UN Charter, and Liberal or Democratic Internationalism, which is US-led. You argue in your book that these two models have been in competition with each other since the end of the Second World War. Can you talk about these two models and the tension between them?

This is a tension which has existed since 1945 and the establishment of the current international system based on the United Nations Charter, and on the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states. And of course, in the early years the United States was willing to work with it, and – unlike the League of Nations after the First World War – joined it and became one of its leaders. But if you look back at the debates in the early years of the United Nations, and in fact its founding, the United States always reserved for itself a certain scope outside of this international system. So there's been that tension between multilateralism and the rights of an individual state. I think the UN Charter-based system was a remarkable series of compromises, and a viable one – until the end of the first Cold War. As long as the US-led liberal order had an alternative – the Soviet bloc, another vision of world order at the level of international politics – this constrained and limited its ambitions. But with the absence of a counterbalance, we had endless talk of unipolarity – US primacy to be achieved globally, and so on. Dominance, even. But if we look back to when the Soviet Union put an end to the Cold War under Gorbachev at the end of the 1980s, people tend to forget what he was appealing to. They think the Soviet Union basically capitulated to the West.

It did not. When Gorbachev ended the Cold War, it was never about: Okay, you guys have won, the West is best, and so on. What he said is: Yes, there are plenty of things we can learn from the West, but in putting an end to the Cold War we are appealing precisely to let those Charter principles dominate. And this is his famous speech in December 1988 to the United Nations – if you look at it, it's absolutely inspirational. And it was a vision for all countries – the United States, European Union states, and all the others – to go back to those foundational UN principles, that moment of hope at the end of the Second World War, the most devastating world war. And this is still the hope of many countries in the Global South and what I call the political East. So yes, there are two visions of world order contesting at this time.

One of the things I find interesting about this is that both of these visions, or models, appeal to the principle of equality, but in different ways. The one based on the UN Charter appeals to equality between states – all states are equals, and no state should interfere in the internal affairs of another state. While the model based on US primacy appeals more to equality within states – democracy, human rights, and so on. And therefore it's very much interested in the internal affairs of other states, and feels entitled, or even obligated, to influence them. Can you talk about the tension between these two ideas and how this has played out?

Yes, there's a tension between those that focus on international politics and those that focus on domestic politics – between domestic affairs and non-interference. But you know, ultimately these visions are not incompatible – they could have been reconciled. That's what Russian leaders have consistently tried to do since the end of the Cold War. But the key issue, in my view, is the dominance – the fact that the political West insists on its hegemony globally. And of course, that means the US. That's why they couldn't let Russia join, after it became an independent state from 1992 onwards. Russia wanted to join the political West. But that would have meant decentring Washington.

It would have meant changing the very nature of the political West – which of course, is precisely what Gorbachev wanted to do. Not to destroy the political West, but to say: Look, the world has changed, you need to change with it. What's astonishing is not just the continuity of NATO policy – the policy of the political West – even after the Cold War ended, but the fact that it has become more insular, more hermetic, more closed, less able to deal with others outside. So we see the emergence of bloc politics and therefore a second Cold War, far more intense, far more pervasive and far more dangerous than the first.

Why would it be a bad thing for the US, or the political West more generally, to dominate the whole world?

Well, of course, if a single empire did dominate the whole cosmos, then you would have peace because there would be no opposition. It would mean everybody else would have to conform to the wishes and desires of the imperial centre. And of course, that has been the dream of empires through the ages. So why it would be a bad thing? Well that's exactly what many in Washington simply can't understand – because the political West, at its base, has got two faces. The one face is empire – that is, the United States, 850 military bases across the globe – 350 of which are encircling China, by the way. So if you're sitting in Beijing, this is not necessarily a good thing. But the other side of the political West is what I nowadays call the 'commonwealth' side: the delivery of public goods. And of course, that it did very positively, in all sorts of ways – in terms of a global and open trading system, reducing protectionism and so on. So there's the imperial face against the commonwealth face. Of course, at no time in human history has a single empire dominated the globe. But clearly this has been the ambition of the political West – in different ways, in different complexity, but it basically says: We are the only hegemon, and therefore there can be no regional hegemonies – China in East Asia, Russia in Northern Eurasia, and so on.

What is the general feeling in the rest of the world in response to what you're outlining, this sort of global hegemonic ambition of the West?

Naturally Moscow, New Delhi, Beijing refused to accept it. And of course, the very principle of that universal US-led empire is completely antithetical to the principles embedded in the UN Charter. Today we have 193 states represented in the UN. Many of these states, over 100, were former colonies. They have now matured as states. And so most of them, even more so today, refuse to accept the dominance of an external power. We're talking about Kenya, we're talking about Uganda, Tanzania, Brazil, South Africa, so many states. And India, of course, which was a colony, although it's a founding member of the UN. So given that the United States has put forward this idea of a universal empire, we now have these anti-hegemonic forces in Beijing and in Moscow, and in a different way in India and elsewhere.

I've heard from a number of political experts that the US has, for a long time, actively opposed any development of closer economic ties between Russia and Germany, or between Russia and Europe more generally. Which would otherwise be a very natural relationship – with Europe benefitting from cheap Russian energy, and Russia from European produced goods. And therefore – so the theory goes – the US feared this relationship, because if it continued it would have made Europe into a major world power. What's your view on this? Do you think it's at least part of the story of how we got to where we are today?

Well it's certainly part of it. I mean, the facts speak for themselves. The US has consistently opposed the energy relationship in particular of Germany and Russia, but more broadly of Europe and Russia – and indeed, any attempt by Russia to achieve even local relationships. This goes way back to initial plans and ideas in the late 1960s, but above all in the 1970s. Reagan, of course, was deeply opposed, until he basically capitulated and allowed it to go forward. So this has been a persistent theme. That's a fact – quite clearly, lots of evidence – including opposition to the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which was opened in 2011, and Nord Stream 2. And I think it was a US Ambassador to Germany who said some years ago: Why on earth should the United States shape European energy policy? Well, Washington would argue, this brings income to Moscow which it can use to build up its military forces. So right from the start, this was a vision of Russia – whether Soviet or post-Soviet, democratic or non-democratic – that said: You can't allow Russia to develop. And of course, to elaborate on this, one of the absolute fears in Washington has always been a deep rapprochement between Germany and Russia, because that would really establish a major powerful force. And by extension, a deep linkage between Brussels and Moscow. And that was a nightmare for the United States.

And that is why it insisted on maintaining this Atlantic Alliance system, NATO, and why this obsession to stop Russia or China or any other state from driving so-called wedges between Washington and Western Europe. It's a view of politics which can envision nothing better than a kind of permanent negative peace – which always has the potential, as it has done today, to verge into outright war. It's an impoverished vision of international affairs – and more broadly, of human destiny. It basically cannot believe that we can have a global order based on visions of peace and development – that sort of vision developed by John F Kennedy in his last year of life, which he gave such profound and emotional and moving testimony to.

And now that we've verged into outright war, with no end in sight – and one that could turn global – what are the prospects for a future global order based on this sort of vision of peace and development?

Well, therefore it's more and more incumbent upon us – including the signatories of this letter, which we started with – to find a vision of a positive peace order which isn't simply about the absence of war, but about facing all sorts of challenges together – climate change, nuclear catastrophe, epidemiological challenges, and so on. How on earth did we find ourselves in a position where we're fighting a war in Europe – and over what? It's not entirely clear, just like when we look back at the First World War – it was very different in the Second World War, but if we look at the First World War – ultimately, what was all that about? If we survive this war today we will have thousands of books written about it. We'll say: How on earth did we allow this to happen? It was such an avoidable war. Why did NATO have to expand when it was quite clear that it would generate tensions?

The whole point of NATO is to prevent war, and by doing this act you have precisely achieved the eventuality which the whole system was designed to avoid. So it couldn't be madder. And hence we simply have to call a pause for it. And on that point, we may need external interlocutors, third parties. I'm thinking of India, I'm thinking of China, I'm thinking of Brazil, I'm thinking of a number of African states, the African Union as an organization. Because basically, what this tells us is that we – that is, we Europeans – cannot manage our own affairs. And we cannot trust Washington to do the right thing. Ultimately, we have to take control of our destiny and establish a European security order that is ours, and in which all the states feel comfortable. And obviously that includes a post-war Ukraine, in which we can then rebuild that society and rebuild a nation – a democratic, sovereign, independent state.

And if I understand you correctly, this sort of European security order would also include a post-war Russia?

Indeed.

You seem hopeful that this is a direction the future can still realistically take. But given that NATO is antithetical to a European security system of this sort – certainly to one that would include Russia – how realistic is it that we could see this sort of thing emerge anytime in the foreseeable future?

It's even worse than that, because we're now seeing the NATO-isation of East Asian security, with the AUKUS bloc, with even talk of a future Asia-Pacific NATO with Japan more tightly bound into it – the Quad, and all of that. Which is basically generating conflict in East Asia, just as NATO generated conflict in Europe. So the darkness at the moment is intense – and it's darkening. So, how realistic? Not at all. However, as I've always argued – we can't get from where we are today to where we want to be, without knowing where that is – without first outlining where we want to go. And there are at least a couple of elements involved here. First, a return to Sovereign Internationalism, and a step back from Democratic Internationalism and the overweening ambitions of the political West. It has to pull back. Look after your own society. The United States is torn by so many conflicts and so much poverty exclusion and difficulties, and so is Western Europe.

We're now being de-industrialized. We need to focus, not on spending two and a half percent on arms and militarization, but, for example, on the 34 percent of children in the United Kingdom who live in poverty, and so on. So that's the first thing. Another one is a more sustained vision of pan-Europeanism. And absolutely including Russia. And this does not entail any anti-Americanism whatsoever. I have enormous admiration for American society and its huge dynamism, and for so many people in the United States with whom I work quite closely on projects for peace and development. What we want is a different and a better America, which can indeed do what John F Kennedy promised it would. So it's not anti-American, but it's post-American. We're simply saying Europe has to be post, and indeed the whole world has to be post-Western. And post-Western is not a negative, it's a positive – because then we can actually move towards this positive peace agenda, where we don't need hegemony. The idea that without the United States the whole world would collapse into global anarchy is nonsense.

You mentioned earlier that during the Cold War, one bloc acted as a restraint on the ambitions of the other bloc. Could this in some sense be a healthy thing? Is it possible that the Eastern bloc that is forming now might create a kind of restraint on the Western bloc, and that this may stabilise things? Or is this just another dangerous situation that we should try to avoid?

I'm opposed to bloc politics on principle, because it means that within the blocs you have policing, discipline, dissident voices are suppressed, and so on. And right now, both in Russia and China – and indeed increasingly in other states – because of external threats, internal suppression is intensified. So we're in this terrible cycle. In the West, of course, certain independent voices are so far allowed, but they're marginalised. So the whole dynamic is awful. The dynamics of Cold War are awful. That's why it was so marvellous for some of us to see the end of the first Cold War and really believe that we could work for a positive peace agenda, which of course we squandered. But will an alternative bloc restrain the political West today?

Well, I think it's a healthy development to have pluralism in the world. But I would prefer it just to be multilateralism, through Charter-type systems, and working together. But bloc politics, Cold War politics, always makes things look black and white – we're the good guys, and you are evil. One of the biggest dangers today is that the very principle of the United Nations – which is the only legitimate force which can issue, for example, universal sanctions and military interventions – is being undermined, because obviously the five veto-wielding powers are at each other's throats. It's a bloc of three against Russia and China. And we are closer to World War III today than at any time since the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

You mentioned multilateralism, which Russia, China and India have been advocating, and which is opposed to the kind of US hegemony we've been talking about. Right now tensions are so high that it's hard to imagine what the world's going to look like after this is over. Do you see a path to some sort of multilateralism once we've got past this conflict?

I do. There will continue to be tensions between states, clearly – historically grounded border issues, for example, between China and India. Yet we have now – how many dozens of countries lining up to join the BRICS+ association? How many want to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization? There's talk in the air of merging the two, and obviously changing their name, to establish a global order. And that would be something I would welcome. Because, if you look at all their declarations, their principles are not 'anti-'. They're anti-hegemonism, of course, but they're not specifically anti-Washington, anti-Brussels or anything like that.

They are constantly appealing to the Charter principles. So we're seeing it already. And recently, for example, Saudi Arabia even warned the European Union that if it illegally seizes – or steals, let's put it simply – that $300 billion of Russian money held in mainly in Belgium, in Euroclear, then it would withdraw its sovereign wealth investments in France in particular, but in Europe more generally. In other words, the Global South, and indeed the political East, is finding its voice. Now that it's matured, it's basically fed up with Western high-handedness. It supports the West insofar as it puts forwards a commonwealth vision, but when it puts forward its imperial vision, they oppose it. And ultimately it's to the West's benefit that they oppose it, because a better West may emerge – one which I'm happy and proud to live in, that's not constantly tainted by militarism, ill-considered interventions, and a sort of intellectual arrogance which reminds us of the worst times of colonialism.

You've been for some time a member of the Valdai Discussion Club, a group of international academics and others that meets every autumn in Russia. In fact, I saw you last year on video asking President Putin a question during the Q&A after his plenary session speech. How long have you been a member, and what's the experience been like?

I'm glad you asked about that, because participation in anything in Russia today – even visiting Russia – is, unprecedentedly, considered unacceptable – breaking with attempts to isolate Russia and so on. And I've always opposed that. I believe in dialogue. I was actually a founding member of the Valdai Club when it was established in 2004. It's a unique institution, because it's a relatively liberal sort of association – clearly within limits, but I mean the tone has always been open. For example, about four or five years ago, one of the participants – I won't name him – started talking in terms of, you know, 'down with American imperialism' – a sentiment with which I'm sympathetic, but the language was very vitriolic, even violent. And immediately the Chair – again I won't give the name – one of the leading figures, said: Stop! – that is not the language we have in the Valdai Club. If it was, I would have nothing to do with it. In fact the debates are remarkably open. In the old days we had quite a few from the United States and Europe. Obviously nowadays – last year for example – no one from the United States.

But a development which I very much welcome is that we had plenty of Indians, plenty of people from China, from Africa, from Latin America – which was marvellous. So the atmosphere, in my view, is much better today because it's no longer imbued with that Western triumphalism and Washington-centred think-tankism, and so on. So we were really talking about genuine global issues. Dialogue, in my view, is always better than insularity. There are also a lot of leading Russian thinkers there, and it's important for them to listen to me as well, because I'm insisting on non-violence, finding a way to peace, and so on. And at the same time, while we understand the Russian position, that doesn't mean we endorse every nook and cranny of it. So it's good for them and it's good for me. And it's amazing the conversations I've had in the corridors, so many informal discussions about how they see the world.

You mentioned that even visiting Russia today is considered unacceptable in the West. Have you had any problems because of your participation in these events?

I'm in a rather privileged position because I'm now formally an emeritus, so I'm no longer employed by the University of Kent, although they've been very supportive of me personally through thick and thin, which I must say gives them all credit. But some active academics, you know, they often ask my advice whether to go, because they do face sanctions back at home. They do face pressures. But this has been going on for 10 years. I remember at a meeting of ASEEES, the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, younger scholars were telling me in the corridors: I don't dare to give this paper expressing a more positive vision of Russia or China or whatever, because I won't get tenure. So this has been a terrible, poisonous erosion of intellectual and academic freedom. Especially at just this moment, when we need more of this, we need more people to go out there and engage in real dialogue.

Richard Sakwa (71)

is Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent at Canterbury, Senior Research Fellow at the National Research University - Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and Honorary Professor at the Faculty of Political Science, Moscow State University. After graduating in History from the London School of Economics, he received his PhD from the Centre for Russian and East European Studies (CREES) at the University of Birmingham. Prior to joining the University of Kent in 1987, he lectured at the Universities of Essex and Santa Cruz, California. He is the author of numerous publications on Soviet, Russian and post-Communist affairs.